"free standards"
I'm glad somebody finally figured out how to accurately describe webm. All this hand-waving talk of 'openness' and 'open standards' was debate poison.
I'm glad somebody finally figured out how to accurately describe webm. All this hand-waving talk of 'openness' and 'open standards' was debate poison.
http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/ "One of the goals of having this code licensed as liberally as possible is to encourage adoption by as many users as possible. This includes both proprietary and free software. Using the GPL license would not be a good match for this goal."
The WebM issue is far from black and white. I still haven't figured out which side I agree with more. What I do know is that a lot of people are arguing tactics. This is a battle between corporations and everybody should be taking 100 steps back to try to figure out the strategies at work on both sides.
Edit: What I'm alluding to in my last point is a lot like Paul Graham's point in this essay from a while back: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Stallman himself agreed that it was a good thing for Xiph to relicense their libraries from the LGPL to a permissive free software license (http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast-dev/2001-February/00...):
In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use."